Posted
by
Zonk
on Friday July 08, 2005 @04:20PM
from the additional-content-land dept.

At first, it was nothing more than a rumour. A "sex mini-game" in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, left in the code for the PC version and unlocked by inquisitive players. Then, as more and more information became available it seemed as though the sex game might be real. This revelation has lead to California Speaker pro-tem Yee blasting the ESRB for their apparent slip-up in examining all the content in the game. The ESRB has responded by pledging a "thorough and objective investigation" of the claims to get to the bottom of the situation. Commentary is available from Joystiq, GamesAreFun, and Buttonmashing.

The current attacks on the gaming rating system is having its desired effect, censorship. Not yet of the big titles, Rockstar will still fight for its number one selling franchise. But smaller games? Forget it. Unless it is considered a hot property starring $.50, you can bet it will be pulled!

Because of people like Leland Yee, the American version of Sonic Gems will be significantly different than the Japanese version:

According to GameSpot, who spoke to Sega regarding this topic, the Streets of Rage games will definitely not be in the US version of Sonic Gems Collection. Ready for the reason? Chances are it's going to piss you off.

It's because Sega would have had to change the game's ESRB rating from an "E" to a "T" to accommodate the inclusion of the somewhat violent titles, and Sega opted to go for the "E" rating instead.

So, Leland Yee can sit back and laugh, haw haw.

I know my girlfriend's 10 year old daughter wouldn't be very interested in Streets of Rage, and I seriously don't think it is going to "affect" her if it were in a game. (Oh look, the little cartoon people are beating each other up, heaven forfend!) This particular case affects mostly people like me, older gamers who really want to play old Genesis games that we may have missed the first time around (I never got Streets of Rage III or Bonanza Brothers.) More broadly, it will effect games that aren't guaranteed sellers and cause the whole market to become more homogenized (while still being just as offensive to those of you who hate the ultra-violent games that are a license to print money.)

The ESRB is a response to kneejerk politicians. Furthermore, the formation of the ESRB was like an admission of guilt. It is an officially accountable target for any critic of videogames. It will never matter what they do.

I just got the game for the pc, and every time I play it I have to wonder how many things I would have enjoyed were taken out because of this promise of doom is held over the head of any company that tries to create an AO rated game.

I'm tired of it, I'm an adult and I want to play adult games. End of story.

All the contents of this mod was already available on the original disks. Therefor the scriptcode, the models, the animations and the dialogs by the original voice-actors were all created by RockStar. The only thing I had to do to enable the mini-games was toggling a single bit in the main.scm file. (Offcoarse it was not easy to find the correct bit). The Nude models that are used as a bonus in the Quick action version of the mod, were also already present on the original disk.

that is if you beleave him...(i see no reason not to, if it were a full mod, install files would need to be much bigger imho)

Explicit sex earns and Adult Only rating in the ESRB system which means that the game can't be sold in areas where minors can get it. This means Wal-mart amongst other places. The fact is that most M titles end up in the hands of kids much like R rated movies do, but NC-17 rated movies and AO games don't for good reason.

I can't believe they'd even code the feature. Did someone really think that they might be able to get that accepted in a retail game? Yeesh -- this isn't Japan.

You see, unlike books and movies, there is limited radio bandwidth available for video games to be broadcast. This means that the government must step in to regulate this limited resource. Especially since it is being broadcast directly into people's homes.

WHAT??? Video games aren't broadcast into people's home through limited bandwidth? THEN WHY THE FUCK DOESN'T THE GOVERNMENT MIND IT'S OWN FUCKIN' BUISNESS? The next thing you know the government will be telling people they can't smoke in bars, they can go to jail for not wearing a seatbelt, and are not allowed to burn the flag, or tell a "naughty" joke in the workplace!

Where does that stupid stereotype comes from, anyway? All the nerds I know already had sex since their teenage days. At our Linux company there was only one guy who wasn't married nor engaged, and he got laid almost every night we went to local bars. The anime guys have plenty of anime girls to choose from, in the local clubs the fangirls are majority. I never ever met a *single* male nerd who had any trouble with women. And yet, everytime someone mentions "girlfriend" or "sex" in/., the same old "nerds can't relate with girls" joke reappears.

Clearly they should be required to put a new warning label on the game:

"Caution: Altering this game may affect game play."

I know it doesn't seem to be altering the game, per se, and it's using built-in but inaccessable content, but really. If using some third-party hack to access game content needs to be rated, why not using some third-party hack to retexture everyone so they're naked? Should all games then get an "M" rating? If this were part of accessible game content, I could see the problem.

Ain't that the truth?
I was watching "48 hours" the other day. A program about real homicide investigations, they showed the corpses laying around with brain-mass splattered around after a gun shot wound to the head, yet they blurred the tits.... Go figure!

Whether or not this is ok can be determined through an exageration.
GAMEZMAKERX produces a Game, 'A Funny Story'. It is all about a kid going to school, flirting with his girlfriend, playing a sports minigame and taking a few quizes/test.
They submit 'A Funny Story' to ESRB and recieve a Rating of 'E' and get a nice large distribution. Yay!
One week after release, a hack is discovered. It turns out that GAMEZMAKERX had originally planned the game to be dirty. 'XXX-Fuzzy' was all about a punk getting laid, cheating on exams and then shooting up his school after expulsion. All of the content was there and to unlock it required a simple mod.
The likely scenarios are:
1) They knew the content was there and they totally leaked to mod.
2) They thought it was all removed. But certain programmers kept in in there to be subversive.
In either case GAMEZMAKERX is boned. There can be no question that they have thoroughly violated the public trust. Claiming that a young player could not accidentally uncover the mod is not good enough. In all likely the kid will be exposed to the content just to be 'in' with his friends. That's life.
That's the extreme. But notheless, it implies that Rockstar is responsible for the content on the disc they produce.
In reality, we have a standout gaming company Rockstar that makes no joke about the kind of games they are about. GTA all the way, baby. '4 life, homie!'
This mod simply cannot harm the reputation this game has already earned. This mod could impact the venue of future sales but I assumed Rockstar was already working on GTA:5. At least, they better be:)
So what is the actual punishment? How heavily do you fine a company for so slight and negligible a shift. Not much, imo. A slap on the wrist to remind game producers that they need to be honest with themselves, the government and their customers.
I am not going to dig up my GTA:SA to see this mod so it ticks me off that I missed out on it. Stupid Rockstar, I love you guys.

So, the big deal is not that there is sex in GTA. You can make a game with sex, and you can sell it. Nobody is stopping you.

The big deal is this: Parents are trying to raise their kids responsibly by monitoring their media... their TV, their movies, their music, and their games. They don't necessarily want to stop their kids from listening to an album, or playing a game. They just want to know what the heck their kids are getting into. Just a little help, like a rating system, and a way to stop kids from getting particularly graphic content. You may not like it, but that's what parents want.

Like all other media, parents want laws to force game manufacturers to label their games, and game sellers to restrict sales to minors. The game industry has argued in response that we don't need laws because "we can police ourselves" via the ESRB.

Well, the ESRB blew it big time, although apparently through no fault of their own. This GTA hack is a glaring example of the failure of self-policing. The ESRB was set up to stop parents from demanding media control laws. Now the ESRB has failed in their mission, and parents are going to start demanding those laws. So the ESRB is furiously trying to protect its reputation.

I work at a large game company (not Take-Two/Rockstar). We are required to reveal all hacks, easter eggs, hidden features, etc. to both first-party (MS, Sony, Nintendo) and the ESRB. There can be no content on the disk that is not reported to these folks, or there a serious consequences. (I'm told they're serious. I don't know what they are.) If Take-Two did not reveal that this content was on the disk, they have defrauded the ESRB. That's bad news for Take-Two and their cash cow. If this content is on the Xbox or PS2 media, they defrauded MS or Sony, who are now liable for the explicit content. That's really bad news.

That's why this is a big deal.

Side Note: This is not censorship. Nobody is banning any games. Adults can buy whatever games they want. Restricting sales of adult games to kids is no more censorship than restricting sales of porn or booze. The censorship argument is a Take-Two argument to whip up support for anything-goes game development so that they can continue to make piles of money selling porn to kids.

Some people may not want to see it but the bottom line is that this was bad for business.

Personally, I would like the chance to buy a AO game. And, again personally, I'd rather get it from my local video game store. But I do not think it likely that EB Games carries AO games or ever will for that matter.

But that doesn't mean I am going to be happy about Take Two 'sneaking one in'. Nor do I advocate lowering the standards of content ratings.

So all said and done, there really needs to be a better way for me to get access to AO games;P

I'm 27 years old and have never had sex before. I've never been on a date either. Around the age of 19 I accepted that a meaningful romantic relationship just wasn't in the cards for me. But It doesn't even bother me anymore.

In my teenage years the amount of effort I was willing to put into establishing and maintaining a relationship was 0. It never mattered to me enough to even bother with, and it still doesn't. If a girl had ever shown interest and initiative I probably would have done something, and in hindsight I may have been presented with just such an opportunity on more than one occasion and just failed to recognize it for what it was.

I would say the joke works because it's true for a large enough percentage.

People want my money. I want to give people my money for their shit. People are willing to give me their shit for my money. I get the shit from the people and the people get my money. The government can go fuck itself. Everybody's happy.

Either way, Does this asshat REALLY expect the ESRB to go through this trouble to find easter eggs (for lack of a better term) like this and rate THEM as well? People had to go through A LOT of trouble in order to get their games to have these scenes in it, you can hardly hold the ratings board accountable for people doing things like this. This guy is absolutely ridiculous.
The ESRB doesn't actually play the games they rate. The developer/publisher/whatever generally provides a video of the most "objectionable" content, and the ESRB people rate the game based on the video.
If this minigame was on the disc, whether it's easily accessible or not, Rockstar should have made the ESRB aware of it. If developers are allowed to leave things like this out of what they show the ESRB, then the whole rating system simply breaks down.

Would certainly qualify this as AO. Still, even in the HotCoffee version, there was no penis and no footage of penetration, unless you count the shading artifacts. Sounds like the good parts of R rated movies from the 80s.

I'm much more inclined to think that if the hidden subject matter was extraordinarily different from the game content that it would merit a lawsuit. With the press this game is getting, and the press it's always gotten, I'm pretty sure there'll be some sort of lawsuit in Rockstar's future. The thing is that they should be able to claim that the rating indicated sexual content. Surely the argument will be that it did not indicate pornography, which some may take this as. (I don't have the game, but I *had* to go see the video to see what the fuss was about. Hilarious. A fifth grader's dream.)

I would potentially be in favor of a lawsuit against Rockstar if this were completely different subject matter than is claimed on the box. I mean, if this mini-game were in Mario Bros, and it had an E rating, then this being found in the game would be distrubing. Thing is, no one ever claimed that GTA was a children's game, and the content of the mini-game is sexual but hardly X-rated. There's nothing in that that couldn't be in an R-rated movie, and it wouldn't be blurry polygons in the movie.